Action Front eBook

Private Wally Ruthven was knocked out by the bursting
of a couple of bombs in his battalion’s charge
on the front line German trenches. Any account
of the charge need not be given here, except that it
failed, and the battalion making it, or what was left
of them, beaten back. Private Wally knew nothing
of this, knew nothing of the renewed British bombardment,
the renewed British attack half a dozen hours later,
and again its renewed failure. All this time
he was lying where the force of the bomb’s explosion
had thrown him, in a hole blasted out of the ground
by a bursting shell. During all that time he was
unconscious of anything except pain, although certainly
he had enough of that to keep his mind very fully
occupied. He was brought back to an agonizing
consciousness by the hurried grip of strong hands and
a wrenching lift that poured liquid flames of pain
through every nerve in his mangled body. To say
that he was badly wounded hardly describes the case;
an R.A.M.C. orderly afterwards described his appearance
with painful picturesqueness as “raw meat on
a butcher’s block,” and indeed it is doubtful
if the stretcher-bearers who lifted him from the shell-hole
would not rather have left him lying there and given
their brief time and badly needed services to a casualty
more promising of recovery, if they had seen at first
Private Ruthven’s serious condition. As
it was, one stretcher-bearer thought and said the
man was dead, and was for tipping him off the stretcher
again. Ruthven heard that and opened his eyes
to look at the speaker, although at the moment it would
not have troubled him much if he had been tipped off
again. But the other stretcher-bearer said there
was still life in him; and partly because the ground
about them was pattering with bullets, and the air
about them clamant and reverberating with the rush
and roar of passing and exploding shells and bombs,
and that particular spot, therefore, no place or time
for argument; partly because stretcher-bearers have
a stubborn conviction and fundamental belief—­which,
by the way, has saved many a life even against their
own momentary judgment—­that while there
is life there is hope, that a man “isn’t
dead till he’s buried,” and finally that
a stretcher must always be brought in with a load,
a live one if possible, and the nearest thing to alive
if not, they brought him in.

The stretcher-bearers carried their burden into the
front trench and there attempted to set about the
first bandaging of their casualty. The job, however,
was quite beyond them, but one of them succeeded in
finding a doctor, who in all the uproar of a desperate
battle was playing Mahomet to the mountain of such
cases as could not come to him in the field dressing
station. The orderly requested the doctor to come
to the casualty, who was so badly wounded that “he
near came to bits when we lifted him.”
The doctor, who had several urgent cases within arm’s
length of him as he worked at the moment, said that